Plant products including specialized metabolites (also referred to as plant secondary metabolites or plant natural products) have important applications as dietary supplements, cosmeceuticals, pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. The term natural product refers to chemical compounds produced by a living organism. In an embodiment such compounds are small molecules. In many instances, due to the complexity of their chemical structures, the production of these products is not feasible via organic synthesis and therefore their availability depends on extraction from plant sources. In vitro plant cultures are recognized as sustainable bioproduction platforms for plant products. Indeed, high value pharmaceuticals such as taxol and ginsenosides are produced at industrial scale via cell suspension and root cultures, respectively. Efforts to increase the levels of plant products in plant cultures have been attempted by elicitation and metabolic engineering strategies. Elicitation approaches have only led to partial increases in yield particularly because of transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms, such as feedback inhibition, that limit their accumulation in the plant. In many cases, these regulatory mechanisms are used by the plant to prevent their accumulation to toxic levels. Furthermore, metabolic engineering efforts have been restrained because many of the enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of high value products are currently unknown.